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Full-Text Articles in Law
Speech Narcissism, Terri R. Day, Danielle Weatherby
Speech Narcissism, Terri R. Day, Danielle Weatherby
Florida Law Review
From its embryonic stage during the civil rights era to its modern-day presence on college campuses, the political correctness movement has undergone an extreme metamorphosis. In the university setting, it was originally intended to welcome diverse views by encouraging minority students to feel part of the learning environment and to contribute to the “marketplace of ideas.” Recently, however, as students more frequently demand trigger warnings and safe spaces in response to speech that they deem personally offensive, the use of political correctness measures on college campuses has had the unintended consequence of chilling speech. Contrary to longstanding First Amendment principles, …
Digitizing The Schoolhouse Gate: Protecting Students’ Off-Campus Cyberspeech By Switching The Safety On Tinker’S Trigger, Joshua Rieger
Digitizing The Schoolhouse Gate: Protecting Students’ Off-Campus Cyberspeech By Switching The Safety On Tinker’S Trigger, Joshua Rieger
Florida Law Review
Secondary-school students regularly engage in cyberspeech both inside and outside the schoolhouse gate. Internet-era forms of communication allow these students to produce off-campus cyberspeech that can easily be accessed or brought onto campus by other students or faculty. As early as the 1990s, public-school administrations began punishing students for off-campus cyberspeech, accessed or brought onto campus, that the administrations deemed threatening, intimidating, harassing, or generally inappropriate for the school setting. Parents continue to challenge public-school administrations’ punishments of their children by filing civil suits in federal courts claiming these administrations violated their children’s First Amendment right to free speech. Whether …
Redefining “Revenge Porn” Reform: A View From The Front Lines, Mary Anne Franks
Redefining “Revenge Porn” Reform: A View From The Front Lines, Mary Anne Franks
Florida Law Review
The legal and social landscape of “revenge porn” has changed dramatically in the last few years. Before 2013, only three states criminalized the unauthorized disclosure of sexually explicit images of adults and few people had ever heard the term “revenge porn.” As of July 2017, thirty-eight states and Washington, D.C. had criminalized the conduct; federal criminal legislation on the issue had been introduced in Congress; Google, Facebook, and Twitter had banned nonconsensual pornography from their platforms; and the term “revenge porn” had been added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. I have had the privilege of playing a role in many of …
Counterspeech, Cosby, And Libel Law: Some Lessons About “Pure Opinion” & Resuscitating The Self-Defense Privilege, Clay Calvert
Counterspeech, Cosby, And Libel Law: Some Lessons About “Pure Opinion” & Resuscitating The Self-Defense Privilege, Clay Calvert
Florida Law Review
Using the recent federal district court opinions in Hill v. Cosby and Green v. Cosby as analytical springboards, this timely Article explores problems with the concept of pure opinion in libel law. Specifically, Hill and Green pivoted on the same allegedly defamatory statement attorney Martin Singer made on behalf of comedian Bill Cosby, yet the judges involved reached opposite conclusions regarding whether it was protected as pure opinion. Furthermore, this Article analyzes notions of counterspeech and the conditional self-defense privilege in libel law in arguing for shielding Singer’s statement from liability. Although the self- defense privilege was flatly rejected in …
Who Watches This Stuff?: Videos Depicting Actual Murder And The Need For A Federal Criminal Murder-Video Statute, Musa K. Farmand Jr.
Who Watches This Stuff?: Videos Depicting Actual Murder And The Need For A Federal Criminal Murder-Video Statute, Musa K. Farmand Jr.
Florida Law Review
Murder videos are video recordings that depict the intentional, unlawful killing of one human being by another. Generally, due to their obscene nature, murder videos are absent from mainstream media. However, in the wake of Vester Lee Flanagan II's filmed murders of reporter Allison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward on live television, it is perhaps only a matter of time before murder videos become an acceptable form of entertainment. Further, Americans should be wary of potential "copycat" perpetrators and their thirst for infamy via immortalization on the Internet, as the free dissemination of murder videos provide extra incentive to commit …
Lost In Compromise: Free Speech, Criminal Justice, And Attorney Pretrial Publicity, Margaret Tarkington
Lost In Compromise: Free Speech, Criminal Justice, And Attorney Pretrial Publicity, Margaret Tarkington
Florida Law Review
No abstract provided.
Regulating The Speech Of Judges And Lawyers: The First Amendment And The Soul Of The Profession, Rodney A. Smolla
Regulating The Speech Of Judges And Lawyers: The First Amendment And The Soul Of The Profession, Rodney A. Smolla
Florida Law Review
The legal profession has historically asserted moral and legal authority to substantially control the speech of judges and lawyers. This impulse to control the speech of judges and lawyers is driven by many of the profession’s most strongly held interests and values. These include such interests as ensuring the fair administration of justice, the promotion of respect for the rule of law, the preservation of public confidence in the legal system, the preservation of the appearance of judicial impartiality, the maintenance of professionalism, and the safeguarding of the dignity of the profession. Some of these interests are palpable and may …
“Camels Agree With Your Throat” And Other Lies: Why Graphic Warnings Are Necessary To Prevent Consumer Deception, Ellen English
“Camels Agree With Your Throat” And Other Lies: Why Graphic Warnings Are Necessary To Prevent Consumer Deception, Ellen English
Florida Law Review
The government’s latest attempt to protect consumers from the perils of tobacco use is in jeopardy. In 2009, Congress enacted the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which requires cigarette advertisements and packages to bear nine new textual health warnings and gives the FDA authority to regulate tobacco products. In 2011, in compliance with the Act, the FDA issued a regulation, known as the graphic warning requirement, which mandates that a color graphic image accompany each of the nine textual warning statements. The graphic warning requirement now faces challenges from the tobacco industry, and the ambiguities current standards present …
The First Amendment, Equal Protection And Felon Disenfranchisement: A New Viewpoint, Janai S. Nelson
The First Amendment, Equal Protection And Felon Disenfranchisement: A New Viewpoint, Janai S. Nelson
Florida Law Review
This Article engages the equality principles of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause to reconsider the constitutionality of one of the last and most entrenched barriers to universal suffrage—felon disenfranchisement. A deeply racialized problem, felon disenfranchisement is additionally and independently a legislative judgment as to which citizen‘s ideas are worthy of inclusion in the electorate. Relying on a series of cases involving state interests in protecting the ballot and promoting its intelligent use, this Article demonstrates that felon disenfranchisement is open to attack under the Supreme Court‘s fundamental rights jurisprudence when it is motivated by a desire to …
Student Speech And The First Amendment: A Comprehensive Approach, Lee Goldman
Student Speech And The First Amendment: A Comprehensive Approach, Lee Goldman
Florida Law Review
Can a school discipline a student for creating a vulgar parody profile of the school principal or another student on the website MySpace? Can it preclude a student from wearing at school a T-shirt that reads, “Homosexuality is shameful”? These are some of the difficult issues raised when students’ First Amendment rights clash with schools’ operational needs and custodial responsibilities. The Supreme Court has addressed students’ First Amendment speech rights on several occasions, most recently in Morse v. Frederick. Lower courts, however, have had great difficulty applying these precedents, particularly when the speech involves the Internet or other new media. …
Possession Of Child Pornography: Should You Be Convicted When The Computer Cache Does The Saving For You?, Giannina Marin
Possession Of Child Pornography: Should You Be Convicted When The Computer Cache Does The Saving For You?, Giannina Marin
Florida Law Review
“For years, defense lawyers have argued the ‘young and stupid’ semidefense for their youthful clients. Now, we can have the ‘I didn’t know it was on the hard drive’ objection for the unsophisticated computer user in child pornography cases—or at least they can in the 9th Circuit.” This quote, appearing on the website of an East Texas criminal defense law firm, refers to the outcome of United States v. Kuchinski. In Kuchinski, the defendant’s computer contained, in various forms, more than 15,000 images of child pornography. There was no question that Kuchinski’s volitional viewing of the images on the Internet …
Student Speech Rights In The Digital Age, Mary-Rose Papandrea
Student Speech Rights In The Digital Age, Mary-Rose Papandrea
Florida Law Review
For several decades courts have struggled to determine when, if ever, public schools should have the power to restrict student expression that does not occur on school grounds during school hours. In the last several years, courts have struggled with this same question in a new context—the digital media. The dramatic increase in the number of student speech cases involving the Internet, mobile phones, and video cameras begs for a closer examination of the scope of school officials’ authority to censor the expression of minors as well as the scope of juvenile speech rights generally. This Article takes a close …
False Statements V. Free Debate: Is The First Amendment A License To Lie In Elections?, Simon A. Rodell
False Statements V. Free Debate: Is The First Amendment A License To Lie In Elections?, Simon A. Rodell
Florida Law Review
No abstract provided.
Returning To Hazelwood's Core: A New Approach To Restrictions On School-Sponsored Speech, Emily Gold Waldman
Returning To Hazelwood's Core: A New Approach To Restrictions On School-Sponsored Speech, Emily Gold Waldman
Florida Law Review
Nearly twenty years ago in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the Supreme Court, in upholding the constitutionality of a public high school principal’s censorship of a student newspaper produced in a journalism class, held that “educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.” Since then, Hazelwood’s “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns” This Article argues that this conundrum can be untangled by returning to Hazelwood’s core as a student speech case. It first …